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Tiny Mix Tapes is a fun idea. Submit some words, a concept, anything, and they’ll try to come up with a mix tape tracklist for you based on what you submitted. Here’s part of one:

High Voiced-bastards that play rock and roll.

01. Pixies – “I’ve Been Tired” (Surfer Rosa & Come On Pilgrim)
02. The Dead Milkmen – “Punk Rock Girl” (Beelzebubba)
03. The Flaming Lips – “Kim’s Watermelon Gun” (Clouds Taste Metallic)
04. The Beatles – “Wild Honey Pie” (The Beatles aka The White Album)
05. Danielson Famile – “Good News For The Pus Pickers” (Fetch The Compass

The bizarre requests are the best part.

Here’s a thread from Ask Metafilter discussing the gap between perceived success as a musician and actual financial success. It’s mostly anecdotes about famous or semi-famous musicians that have day jobs. It’s strange to me that this fact is still a mind blower.

Sometimes I wonder if artists being more up front about their earnings would impact file sharing. Something I’ve noticed is that many people exaggerate what they think musicians earn, which makes it easier to dismiss buying their albums after they download them. What’s $15 to an artist who’s riding around in a limosine, right? What if you knew he took the bus? To work? Where he gets paid less than you?

Major label culture does a lot to encourage the belief that once you’re on the radio or on MTV you’re rich and a complete success. It can be good for business, sell albums and attract more fans. And the artists happily go along with it for the same reasons and because it makes them feel good — nobody wants to be a failure. But it can also trigger a backlash where fans (especially Internet fans) don’t want to support you because they’ve been convinced that you don’t need their support.

It makes me think about alternative/industrial bands that I dissed when I was a teenager because I thought they “sold out” when it’s pretty clear in retrospect that they were probably just barely scraping by.

I’m guessing that as the label and star system flattens and spreads out (which is already happening gradually) the disparity between fame and big bank accounts will become more obvious.

I Ate iPod Shuffle – a fun poem about eating an iPod Shuffle. [via]

FAWM – It’s February Album Writing Month apparently. 14 songs in 28 days.

The WriteExpress Online Rhyming Dictionary finds better rhymes, but Rhymezone displays the results in a more useful way. I hate it when that sort of thing happens. I absolutely refuse to write my own web based rhyming dictionary, dammit.

Exist Angst wrote to tell me that my song I Think I Started A Trend has moved up from #45 to #20 on the Triple J Net 50, making it the highest gainer in the past week. If you would like to vote even more for it and fight against the dark forces of uh Interpol and uhh the Team America soundtrack, you can do that here.

It’s just the Net 50, no big deal, right? Nay, says he:

Songs that do well in the net 50 get played more often by the station and move up into high rotation. In fact if enough of your songs do well in the net50, I Dont Know What Im Doing could easily become a feature album.

Woo, rock the vote.